Tanya Tandoc

I finally got a chance try out The Flying Stove, one of Wichita’s non-taco food trucks. I have been web-stalking them since they opened, drooling over their yummy-looking pictures and Facebook posts. I’m happy to report that the food tastes even better than it looks.

Wichita has never been known as a city that favors healthy food. We are most famous for Pizza Hut, delicious beef, and huge portions. Meat is king here and won’t soon be dethroned, but recently a couple of brave, vegetarian-friendly restaurateurs have been making health-conscious dining a whole lot easier.

I was a judge at the Death by Chocolate event this last weekend at Exploration Place. To some, it might have sounded like heaven—table after table covered with beautiful, inventive chocolates, cakes, and cookies. To me, it looked like an uphill marathon I hadn’t properly trained for. We had to taste everything, and that meant about a hundred individual sweets. My teeth hurt after the first 10 offerings. I got the sugar shakes after the 30th truffle. My vision blurred by the time we had finished the gauntlet and I had to sit down. By the time I got home I was as ill as I could be.

I grew up in Newton, Kansas, in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It goes without saying that there weren’t many fun dining options in our little town. We had a Big Cheese Pizza, a Pizza Hut, a Sonic, The Red Coach Inn, and a Hardee’s. There were a couple of coffee shops and our Woolworth’s had a lunch counter—the old-fashioned kind—but that was torn down and replaced with a thrift store. We had one fancy restaurant, the Old Mill, which featured the first salad bar I had ever seen and served adult beverages, a rarity in our dry county.

I am obsessed with kimchi. I think about the earthy, fermented, spicy pickle all the time. I know that some people find kimchi’s deep funkiness repellent, but I love it. Kimchi is one of the most common Korean condiments and is made with vegetables, chili pepper flakes, garlic, ginger and salt. It is lightly fermented, sort of like sauerkraut, and then eaten as a side dish or used as an ingredient in Korean cooking. The kimchi most of us are familiar with is made with Napa cabbage.